Music on cassettes

Introduction

On the occasion of the Muslim month of fasting I would like to present manzuma, a special kind of musical creative art, which is very popular among Muslims in Ethiopia. Although Ethiopian Muslims would reject to call manzuma chanting as ‘music’ it has without doubt a musical character. Manzuma songs belong to the spiritual and religious sphere of life they which is clearly distinguished from the profane world of music.

This is a cassette of Dur Dur,1 a group from Somalia which was very popular in the 1980’s. When I first listened to it I was amazed by the sound which resembled very much 1970’s funk music. John at Likembe writes about similar experiences. He presents also a lot of more information about Dur Dur in a another posting.2

This blog is the continuation of a small web project for the presentation of the relatively unknown popular music of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia. I had put some songs on that site which were in the RealAudio format. As a beginning of this new blog I will present these songs now in MP3 fomat.

Afar Music

The Afar are one of the two main ethnic groups of Djibouti, but there are also Afar in Ethiopia and Eritrea. For a long time the center of Afar popular music was the town Tadjoura (Tagorre in the Afar language) on the Red Sea cost of northern Djibouti, because most Afar singers come from that town.

Fatouma Mansour

Fatouma Mansour is an Afar singer from Djibouti. I took the first song from a cassette I bought 1995 in Assayta, which was the capital of the Afar region of Ethiopia at that time1. The cassette is just a copy with the names Abdallah Lee2 and Fatu3 written in Amharic on the cover. Since there is no additional information on the cover the title of the song remains unkown to me.

Abdallah Lee & Medina Habib

The second song is from Abdallah Lee (vocal & guitar) and another female singer, Medina Habib. This song is from a cassette I bought 1995 in Djibouti. As the cassette metioned above, this one is also only a copy with no information except the first names of the two interprets.